


.We're Fishing Up Our Dead Hope.

by Sanguis



Series: Original Work [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dragons, Gen, Original work - Freeform, Water Spirits, skeleton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-16
Updated: 2014-03-16
Packaged: 2018-01-16 00:40:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1325257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanguis/pseuds/Sanguis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He lives in the realm between the landscape stretching around him and the waters that cleanse the rocks, belongs to the fish and the sweet rain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	.We're Fishing Up Our Dead Hope.

**Author's Note:**

> If you squint, this is a follow-up to Kisses of Dead Things, but it can be read as a stand-alone. It'll just seem a bit less weird if you do read it. Or maybe not.

Strange, how we decorate pain – Margaret Atwood.

 

159 years after Bartram’s apotheosis.

* * *

 

 

The frogs don’t croak in the morning.

_ They never will again, _ the fishes whisper. Filled with poison, they taint the waters and his dreams. With gaping mouths, the fishes whisper his name:  _ Niran, Niran, eternal water, _ but he drowns them out with the sound of his violin. His feet touch the water, but he no longer feels at home in these contaminated waters.

In three days it worsens; the fishes begin to mutter things that make little sense, but that Niran slowly begins to recognise as things he may have heard before:  _ I wish to learn that tune; I wish that she loves me and only me; I dream of power _ …

He can assign a face to each line he hears, because he remembers them – those of the mortals who did dare cross the field of red poppies – he remembers them offering their dreams in return for a seedling of happiness, and from the corner of his eyes, he’d watched them leave the Weeping Woods without their dearest dreams. 

Irritated, he says to his fishes, “You weren’t supposed to eat those.” But they seem not to hear him at all.

Niran climbs the mountain for some peace of mind. He’s never appreciated rowdy fish, but he would rather not cut them into pieces he can use, to empty his water completely. It takes him one night to reach beyond the mountain and into the downs.

In the early morning light, he sees the pond in the middle with a smoking hole next to it, a large pit that smells of honey and cinnamon, where a dragon sleeps and hoards his treasure. Niran lets his body sink into the pond and waits. The sun is warm on his back, but the pond water is cool, so he sinks and sinks until only his brown eyes remain above the surface.

“These are not your waters, [Adüe Yelü](http://-/),” the dragon says when he emerges from his pit. His scales are silver and filled with shadows, like the words spilling from his tongue. Niran has always loved the sound of Sombrae, the way it creeps into his bones.

 _My waters have exiled me, drokke_ , he intends to answer. Instead, the water bubbles furiously.  _My own waters hate me, and it’s all because of those rowdy fish._

The dragon, Qamar, folds his paws to rest his head upon them. There’s amusement in his voice when he says, “And have you come to take my waters?” 

Niran rises just enough so that his nose is out of the water. He shows the dragon a knife – a misericorde he had gotten in exchange for teaching a mortal his craft. He knows very little of knives and weapons alike, but the mortal had told him that the knife is beautiful and worth much gold. Niran cares little for gold, but the dragon likes knives; he hoards them like precious things. “Can I please stay, drokke?”

“Well, you  _ are _ lovely company,” the dragon answers as he takes the misericorde. His paw and claws are massive compared to Niran’s hand, but he gingerly takes the misericorde, disappears briefly into his lair to place it among his hoard of knives. Niran sinks back into the water, if only to try and feel at home. He’s never stayed long in the Qamar’s domain, lovely as it and its inhabitant are.

“This doesn’t solve your problem,” says Qamar upon returning.

This pond is smaller than his pond in the forest, and only six feet deep. Niran sinks and feels that he reaches the bottom too quickly. The dragon follows him down, but he only submerges his head and half of his long, elegant neck.

“I need my waters back,” Niran mutters into the pond. Qamar pulls him back to the surface. With the water sliding off and between his scales, he seems to glitter more.

“Speak to your brother,” he says. “Or your mother. Do you know how to find them?”

Niran doesn’t. They visit him, from time to time. They give directions on how to find The Black Palace, but Niran only half-remembers. It hasn’t been important - now it  _ is _ . His mother would know what to do; she had been the one to make him, after all.

It’s part of why he’s here now. Qamar, child of E Ressiye Paerlum, must know how to find The Black Palace; he’d been born there, after all. Qamar says, “Follow the crows with flowers in their feathers, and ask to E Skurtaem Raesseana for his whereabouts.” He pauses briefly. “You know, yes? Not to let them pluck your name from your lips?”

That, Niran does remember. E Skurtaem Raessaena like to play games. They take hearts and names in the same manner as he takes hopes and dreams.

“Would they not spare me?” he asks. “I only seek my mother.” Would they not retract their claws so as to not upset [E Maedü](The%20Mother)?

“I...am uncertain.” Qamar’s eyes narrow, scrutinising. “Do not tell them your name. Promise me.”

They stare at each other. Niran says, voice soft, “I promise.”

Niran stares at Qamar, stares until there’s naught else to see but the smoky crater gaping back at him. He smiles as he sinks deeper into the pond.

A crow wakes him in the morning with the hellish noise it makes. The sound of its cries pierces straight through the water, to the bottom where Niran lies curled up. The fish here are quiet, but that black creature that yells for the Adüe Yelü distresses them. He pets them to stop their trembling, cleans their fins and shines their scales. He swims to the surface to greet the bird, upon which it stops its screeching and flies away. A feather flutters down unto the water.

He’s not sure what it means; birds are strange creatures and he’s never bothered to learn their language. They belong to the world of the skies, to the forests and the trees. He lives in the realm between the landscape stretching around him and the waters that cleanse the rocks, belongs to the fish and the sweet rain. He tries to remember in which direction the bird flew; fortunately, these directions appear to be the same as those of the waters below.

The crow leads him north, out of the downs and beyond its hills. The ground beneath his feet turns black and slowly fills with strange red flowers that smell of something sweet, but look like blood. Some of them are pink, like the cheeks of blushing mortals, and yet others are orange, but dark and nearly red. Crows fly overhead and he follows them and their fluttering feathers. They are as rowdy as the fish that ruined his waters, but he grows to like them; they are distant and majestic, dark.

After another night, he stumbles upon an arbour decorated with white roses; the path leads him to an oak tree. A black palace rises behind and around it, and grass circling the tree roots, but no water in sight. His skin has become brown and shrivelled and his throat is parched. The humming sounds eerie and faraway, not at all like those black birds he’d followed, even if they are the only things he can see, high up in the tree. The branches flicker between earthy brown, littered with leaves, and light grey, barren.

Gentle hands lift his head from the green grass upon which it rests and places it upon someone’s lap. Her face is pale as the moon but her lips are as red as the flowers he had passed on his way here. She looks vaguely like death, with her sunken cheeks and bony features, and there’s three of her looking down at him with their empty eyes. He counts seven flowers atop each head of black hair.

“You are very far from water, Adüe Yelü,” three voices say simultaneously. “Too far to save you.”

“Qamar sent me,” he murmurs. No matter what he intended, his throat produces is scratchy and unintelligible to his own ears.

“[Nürye pressaye](http://-/).” They say softly. “[Yelü viy’E Ressiye Paerlum](http://-/).”

Sombrae doesn’t sound as pleasant from their lips, not deep enough. Their speech is almost like a song, just not the melody and tone he has grown used to. “E Dyure Paerlum is not in his palace. What do you ask of us, Adüe Yelü?”

He should not ask anything of them. He came to see his mother, his brother. He’s heard whispers of E Skurtaem Raessaena - Bartram’s wily creatures, collected from ruined villages, skeletal. They answer to Bartram, yes, but they also do as they please.

He should not ask anything of them. They are like him, a curse.

“My waters,” he rasps, “My waters have exiled me.”

“You have been a naughty child,” they tell him. “You have let the fish eat mortal hopes and dreams.”

He frowns. How could he  _ stop _ those silly fish from eating, how could he keep the mortals from throwing away their only possessions just to learn his art? They come to his waters and ask for what is not theirs, for what they can never keep. He asks for the thing they cherish most, the dreams they want to see come true. Is that not a fair price?

“We will give you waters, Adüe Yelü,” The sisters say. “In exchange, we demand your name.”

“You call me by the only name I have,” he tries.

“Do not lie to us.” He hears a lot of clicking sounds in their chastisement, and he watches the petals fall from their crowns. “You are too far from your waters. Our request is simple:[ E nemin Maedü dünzel’ebe](http://-/).”

A pause.

They say, softer, “Your name, for something greater. A loss for a great gain.”

A petal falls into his gaping mouth, dry, crisp and sweet. He feels compelled to speak, even as Qamar’s warning echoes in his mind.  _ Promise me. _ He has made too many false promises to mortals, to fiends, to frogs and to fish. That promise was never meant to be false, it’s a promise he needs to keep. And still, he chokes out the word with the taste of his blue blood: “Niran.”

Their smiles are ghoulish; hungry, they eat the word and leave him nameless. Their father never was this cruel, even when he condemned his own genitor.

“Drink,” they say, prying at his mouth with their spidery black fingers. “Drink.”

Thick, warm and salty, the liquid they force down his throat is not like any water he’s ever tasted. He has to swallow, and swallow quickly; even so, some of it dribbles down the side of his chin, unto his neck. It feels as unpleasant as it tastes, and it  _burns_ like acid on his tongue.

His limbs are heavy and he’s screaming. No longer lying on grass, he recognises the water around him as his own. The fish are quiet, wide eyed and gaping. Something red spills from his mouth, floating before his eyes while his tongue prickles horrendously.

He floats up and up, until he feels the air batting against his skin. The red stops floating in front of him, instead it drips from the corners of his mouth down to his chin and into the water. It doesn’t stop, it even when it mixes with his tears.

“What happened?” The voice comes from above him. The tone carries a note of urgency. A dark-skinned man sits on a boulder, arms crossed. His eyes are luminous grey, his hair silver-white like the moon. To see Qamar like this is a rare treat.  _ He’s even prettier than before _ . 

He tries to tell Qamar that. The sound that comes from his mouth sounds strangled. He cannot form any words with an absent tongue.

_ Why be so cruel to me? _

“N-” Qamar tries. Stops. He tries again. Then, in a horrified tone to match his expression, he says, “I cannot speak your name.  _ What happened?” _

His heart pounds wildly, and he sinks further and further into the water until he reaches the very bottom. His fish swim away from him in fear. He is unsure of what he is now, nameless and voiceless; can he still call himself a child of the water?

He wants the silence to stretch and stretch, to devour him and make him as insignificant as he feels. Let the Black God and his Skeleton girls have his voice, then. Whatever the red thing in his mouth, flowing from the absence of his tongue, is becoming his own blood – flowing red, to purple to blue, and tasting of death.

It’s then, in the midst of the disarray in his head, he feels something else.

Beyond the familiarity of this pond, the pond by Qamar’s crater, he has the vague awareness of the pond in the forest - water calling to water. Both, suddenly, are a part of him, as he is of them. And beyond  _ that - _

Vast. Strange. Crashing against sand. It’s more water than Niran has ever felt the presence of. Prickly, somehow.

The sea. Is that not what Qamar had once told him?

There’s more too. The river. He is keenly aware of every body of water nearby, aware of the exact dimensions of the ponds, the river, the sea. He can connect them. He can go to them, if he just thinks it.

Closeby, he can hear the pond-water swoosh. Qamar’s face appears above him, half his body submerged. His expression is wide-eyed, concerned. His long silver-white hair swirls around him, catches the light of the sun quite beautifully. Qamar pulls him out of the water, carries him elsewhere. All he can do is stare at the still surface of the pond as they leave it behind.

His name and his tongue, for something greater - all the waters are now his.

**Author's Note:**

> Adüe Yelü: Water Child  
> Drokke: Dragon  
> E Skurtaem Raesseana: The Skeleton Sisters  
> Nürye Pressaye: Our (parallel) cousin  
> Yelü viy’E Ressiye Paerlum: Child of the Black Brother  
> E nemin Maedü dünzel’ebe: The name Mother gave you


End file.
